


Seven Devils

by Skoll



Series: Seven Devils [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bored Tony isn't much better, Bored gods are scary things, Character Study, FrostIron - Freeform, Loki is not above using that heart against him, M/M, Manipulations, Norse Myths & Legends, Pre-Slash, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-08
Updated: 2013-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-24 04:52:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/630624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skoll/pseuds/Skoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki, after his return to Earth, decides the Avengers are amusing to toy with; Tony, after Loki's fucked with him one time too many, decides that he's going to understand the trickster god if it's the last thing he does; both of them think they have the situation under control.</p>
<p>One of them has to be wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Holy water cannot help you now

**Author's Note:**

> The title from this, and the chapter titles, are taken from Florence + The Machine's lovely song Seven Devils, which originally inspired this story. This work is the first of a planned series. The two chapters to this fic are character studies of Loki and Tony respectively, with the later stories building on these character studies.
> 
> Enjoy.

Courtesy of Idunn's apples, very few things are genuinely harmful to an Aesir. Time, the unconquerable adversary of the mortal races, scarcely touches the gods once they are full grown; disease, similarly, is near to unheard of amongst the population of Asgard. Wounds may fell them, true, but given the hard-forged peace with Jotunheim the deadliest wounds most Aesir see in present days are caused by mishaps or slips on the training field. 

What most Aesir fear most is harm done to their reputations, to their oft-told stories of self-congratulatory glory on battlefields and in bedchambers; a wounded pride is a terrible thing in Asgard, with their crown prince a shining example of this. Loki, though, is not the crown prince, and his reputation has ever been unsavory (since even before he was old enough to deserve the dislike and distrust he later earned, in truth)—even a damaged reputation will do him no greater ill in the eyes of Asgard.

In all of Loki's long life, the only force he has ever encountered which is equal to the task of doing him harm is a simple thing: boredom.

Loki cannot bear to be still, to be surrounded by weak minds incapable of individual thought—it wears at him, as water over stone, the inanity propelling him to move or be forever lost. His sanity is...precarious, as even he knows; boredom exacerbates his worse tendencies, turns him to deeds and thoughts that even he might shy away from else. 

Much of Loki's childhood was a study in boredom. For all that he could then still name himself Odinson and speak the words true, for all that he was then a prince in line for the throne of Asgard, Loki was never quite at home in the shining city of his youth. It was not in him to spend hours at the sword, dreaming distantly of blood and glory, which was how his brother spent the majority of his time. Loki was quick and clever with knives, and out of admiration for his father learned use of a spear, but these tasks were never his focus. He trained to fight because it was expected of him, and because he saw the virtue in being capable of self-defense, never because he loved the rush of a fight or the feeling of an opponent forced to yield to him. 

For all that he was a capable fighter, Loki would (then, as now) much rather spend time working at unraveling the secret threads of magic, the complicated loops and snarls of power that made up a sorceror's work. These things intrigued him, fascinated him, and he reveled in each new discovery and advancement in skill. It was magic Loki truly loved, not brute force—but magic was a woman's territory, and Loki's involvement in it caused only confusion in the rest of the Aesir. He was, for his keenness of mind and the chosen focus of his thoughts, considered effeminate, strange, foreign. No Aesir of his own age quite knew how to speak with him—and so Loki grew up in relative isolation from his peers, peripherally entangled in the affairs of Thor and his absurd group of friends, but otherwise left to his own devices. 

This gave him a good deal of time on his hands, and even Loki could not fill the whole of it with magic. Nor could he fill it with conversation, reclusive as he was, or the games common to children. By the time he had a century to his name he knew every pathway through Asgard, and some ways that would take him to others of the nine realms when his magic developed a little more; he had read nearly every book he could lay hands on that interested him and some that were uninteresting he read simply because they were there; he had learned magic far beyond what any others his age were capable of; and he was bored. 

So he turned to tricks, because he had the skill for them and they could offer him some amusement; then, his reputation for chaos and mischief began to be properly earned. Slowly, Loki learned the beauty of a well-crafted lie. Here was the feeling of victory that he had never felt on a battlefield—seeing the face of another as they believed every word that passed his lips, and knowing that it was his own skill that had brought about that belief. They called him silvertongue, they called him liesmith, and for a long while that was enough to put the boredom aside.

It could not always be, though. Loki is not a creature meant to be held to one form or one place—Asgard, for all its wonders, could not be big enough for him for long. Boredom lead him on to a dangerous, dangerous thought: perhaps the throne of Asgard might be enough to hold his interest. And Loki, unknowing of what he truly did, threw himself down a path that he treads to this day.

He cannot bring himself to regret it, of course (there are very few things for which Loki Once-Odinson will let himself feel regret, and he does not often dwell on them.) For his exile from Asgard, his break from the Aesir, Loki was rewarded with Midgard.

Midgard, which is everything Asgard was not, where magic has been abandoned altogether for the parallel path of science. Midgard, which fought so valiantly (and, to Loki's great but unvoiced surprise, so successfully) against him when he came calling with an army at his back. Midgard, which is home to the Avengers.

The heroes of humanity amuse Loki, and Loki knows enough to value those things which catch his interest even fleetingly. They are, perhaps, stronger and more capable than the rest of their (generally pathetic) species; nevertheless, though, each of the Avengers is completely and utterly mortal. Breakable, fragile things, they still dare to stand against any force that can be brought to bear against their world, and somehow they do not fall. Even to Loki, the brightest mind that Asgard has to offer, they did not fall. That is worth something, at least.

The spy-woman, Natasha Romanov, who dared to lie to the God of Mischief—she catches his attention. Bruce Banner, the soft-spoken scientist who carries rage that beats almost tangibly through his veins, does not escape Loki's attention either. Most of all, though, it is Tony Stark, whose tongue is quick enough that even Loki Silvertongue appreciates his wit, whose bravado holds in the face of an angry god, that catches Loki's eye. That these pathetic creatures, these mortals, are enough to intrigue him when all the gods could not, is the sort of irony that amuses Loki in and of itself.

They are wise enough, when they capture him, to bind his mouth shut on his brother's advice, to shut him off from his most valuable resources: his magic, and his words. Still, though, Loki is not made for stillness, for containment. Odin considers Loki enough his son still to unbind him when Loki comes before him, and that is an error on the part of the Allfather; Loki uses on Odin the most dangerous tool in a liar's arsenal (namely, the truth, applied correctly), and Odin spares his life. Loki is punished, yes, but that is immaterial and quickly ended—and then he is free.

“Where will you go, brother?” Thor asks, on the day of Loki's final unbinding. His—not his brother now, not ever his brother in true—looks concerned for Loki's well-being. Such sentimentality is a weakness in Thor, and Loki cannot help the sneer which crosses his face.

Loki adjusts one of his sleeves, carefully, paying more mind to that than to the golden-haired fool before him. “Wherever I please,” he says, and between one breath and the next he is beyond Thor's sight, slipping away to a path between the worlds.

There is only one place in all the nine realms, now, that pleases Loki. Perhaps it is time to pay another visit to the Avengers.


	2. A thousand armies couldn't keep me out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter mentions a specific incident in Norse mythology that isn't mentioned in the comics or the movie, so if you don't know who Skadi is, I would suggest a brief trip to Wikipedia before reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska%C3%B0i
> 
> Additionally, the Tony who appears in this chapter and in future works is very much movie-verse Tony, and not the Tony Stark you see in the comics. 
> 
> Enjoy.

The thing about Loki, as everyone knows, is that the guy is a god of chaos, with all the unpredictability that implies. No one ever quite knows whether Loki will play nicely with others or tear up the playground, metaphorically speaking—something that seems to be a gesture of peace may or may not carry a hidden sting, and even Loki's obviously aggressive plans may spin off in unanticipated directions. Loki is not, is never, predictable. This is the first, most obvious thing anyone knows about Loki.

In Tony's opinion, it's also the greatest lie that Loki Silvertongue has ever gotten away with. He almost respects the crazy bastard for that.

The thing is, nobody is completely unpredictable. Everybody has a trigger—this word, that phrase, pressure just there, and everyone will make the expected move. Loki's good, Tony will give him that, one of the best Tony's seen, but that doesn't make him completely infallible. Take away his magic, take away the clever, brilliant, dancing thing that Tony knows Loki's mind to be (hey, he gives credit where it's due), take away the usual villainous ranting and the snappy comebacks, and what you're left with is a kid who felt unloved, undervalued, and grew up angry because of it.

Yeah, Loki deserves his title of trickster, of silvertongue, of liesmith—Tony isn't denying that. But underneath that is the complicated, painful knot of Loki's relationships with the people most involved in his childhood (and, considering that all Tony really knows about that is what he's heard from Thor when he gets the big guy drunk, he has to assume circumstances there are even worse than he knows them to be.) Ties like that, ties of blood and history and family that got tangled up like a stranglehold along the way, are hard to really break free of.

Tony—well. Tony might know just a little about those.

Point being, Loki is still bound to his family, much as he'd like not to be. It shows in every interaction the god of chaos has with Thor, shows in the expression in his eyes whenever his brother says their father's name. In that way, at least, Loki is predictable. He is a known quantity, categorized and linear, at those moments.

And that means that Tony can predict him. Only sometimes, only very rarely—but, as Fury knows perfectly well, if you give Tony an inch he'll take a mile, your car (which he'll upgrade, and c'mon, he promises to give the helicarrier back mostly as he found it), the food in your fridge, and any sexual favors you're willing to offer. 

Loki gave Tony that inch, and Tony is more than willing to use that. He's going to analyze Loki, he's going to sink into Loki's skin whenever the god lets him, he's going to get into Loki's thoughts and make himself at home there. He is going to break Loki down until all his component parts are laid out in front of Tony in neat rows, and he is going to rifle through those parts until he knows every sharp edge and rough spot by feel against his skin, until Loki's particular clockwork is more familiar to Tony than his own. It's crazy, Tony knows, but then, no one has ever accused Tony Stark of being sane.

“Hey, Jarvis? Set up a new file for me, dump everything we've got on Loki in there. I'm starting a new project.” 

“Certainly, sir. Do you have a name in mind for this project?”

Tony sits forward on his couch, raises his glass from the table in front of him, and watches the liquid swirl with the movement as he thinks. Tony knows his Norse mythology, more out of self-defense at this point than anything else, and so it doesn't take long before he comes up with something, albeit something a little cruel.

(The delivery, Tony hopes, will not reflect the name he has in mind—Tony's never been big on torture, for what he thinks are fairly understandable reasons, and torture by snake venom sounds frankly disgusting. He doesn't want Loki hurt, at all—well, to any degree beyond what is expected, considering that Loki is a supervillain and Tony is mostly considered a hero these days. But the intention, at least, is the same. Tony wants Loki bound in a way he can't escape, wants Loki held where Tony can see him and make sense out of him, wants Loki to never twist out of his comprehension again. Tony wants Loki bound, and he wants to be the one that puts him there. In that, at least, the name is appropriate.)

“Yeah,” Tony says, aloud, and takes his scotch like a shot (a horrible waste of good liquor, he knows, but somehow a little old-fashioned Dutch courage sounds good right now.) It burns its way down his throat, but it does the job Tony wants it to. “Call the project 'Skadi.'”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last of the two character studies. The next work in the series should go up by later this afternoon, so if you've read this far and enjoyed, please keep an eye out for that.


End file.
